


Jungle in the Mist

by Tathri



Category: K (Anime)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Domestic, Mental Anguish, Mysteries, Other, Prologue, Psychological Trauma, Questions Without Answers, get ready for the father/son dynamic of 2015, if he's kiritsugu then is Kagutsu Kotomine???, kiritsugu emiya is that you
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-24
Updated: 2015-11-21
Packaged: 2018-05-02 15:52:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5254190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tathri/pseuds/Tathri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every forest, no matter how overgrown and vast, began from a single sprout. Amidst death and desolation, Seigo Ootori discovered that seed and Tenkei Iwafune nurtured it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jungle in the Mist

**Author's Note:**

> A prologue of sorts to K: Return of Kings. Written from the perspective of resident false priest Tenkei Iwafune in the span of the fourteen years leading up the present plotline.
> 
> I'm really bad at fanfic commitment so bear with me and have faith. Probably going to be at least five chapters. This is mostly speculation and an attempt to recreate the internal dynamics of the Green and Gray Kings, as well as their backstory. Obvious spoilers, read at your own risk!

'The beginning is crucial in any human relationship'. A single line, crooned with a smirk and a wink to each applicant in CATHEDRAL, often no matter the groans and rolled eyes that accompanied it, was the motto at the heart of the Gray King and his clan. 

But the end, the shattering conclusion that rendered everything to an eventual stop was an event that Seigo Ootori had no cheeky adage for. 

It was over now. The dust settled, for the most part. Cinders and ash churned across the ruined, derelict skeleton of a city in an ever present haze. Concrete was caved inwards, metal had rotted and bent into unnerving contortions, and debris littered the streets in massive chunks. The first word that came to his mind was 'warzone', but no military could have ever dreamed of such destruction.

He stumbled blindly through the ruin. Countless times he peered inside destroyed homes, the wrecked apartment flats that crookedly teetered on broken foundations. Silence greeted his wandering, hopeless search for survivors. Grit and detritus clung to his soles, scraped along the torn devastation. Every sight burdened his conscience, wore through his mind like wriggling worms of stress and despair, and ever increasingly egged him on to find at least one remnant he could recover. 

If Seigo Ootori could rescue just one person, then his existence in this nightmarish world would have meaning. If he could lead one lost soul to salvation, then he could face the dozens of clanmates sacrificed beneath the Damocles Down in the next life. By freak accident or a last ditch effort, he was cursed to that purpose.

No matter how he shouted, how his voice strained with every increasing desperation, he knew there wasn't anyone left that he could have helped. The anguish mounted in him like an ever increasing burden of stones. His steps grew heavier, sluggish, and his hands balled into fists. Nails bit at his palms, scoring marks that bled, but even that minor pain felt woefully insignificant.

Finally, his aimless wandering lured him to a precipice, a jutting cliff that presented a panoramic view of his uselessness as a King. He had no right to express shock, but the sheer extent of the loss surpassed anything he'd ever witnessed. Rubble, strewn for miles, a graveyard that stretched without limit. The dying gift of a Red King on the brink of self-destruction. The name that had floated over his tongue in cheerful rapport, mocking, laughter, and sober discussion drifted away one final time.

"Kagutsu... What have you done?" 

A tiny, minuscule portion of him knew this was not his dead friend's fault. It was an awful, gaping horror to accept that it was even reality. In a show of tremendously naïve idealism, his clan, CATHEDRAL, had believed it could prevent the inevitable by uniting and surmounting it together. What fools they'd been. What blind, preposterous notion had possessed them to believe they could have held a flame against this? The power that they presumed to wield as 'Kings' that could so easily transform itself into an organic bomb, capable of flattening cities and snuffing out everything in its path. A prolonged conclusion or a disastrous calamity? Was it Kagutsu's personality and ego that had exaggerated the catastrophe to such an extent, or was it, gut wrenchingly, their delaying actions which had unwillingly exacerbated it?

The whorls of bleak, grim misery cloyed at his heart. Forcing himself forward, the Gray King drove his body to the very edge of the drop and yelled into the abyss.

"Is there anyone alive out there?!" 

Whirling gusts of wind carried across the city he'd known, loved, and cherished.

"Someone.. Anyone!?" His voice strained, raked dry from countless similar shouts. 

But no one came.

"Please.." the King begged, emptily voicing his prayer to a disaster he could not even begin to crawl free from, "someone answer me!" Dejection sunk into him even as he resorted to pleading with the dead. Rotating his eyes downwards, he was faced with an even more dismal sight. A slab of immense cloven stone jutting upwards on a harsh slope, so closely resembled a grave marker, a... 

A small, fragile body was pinned underneath it.

The Gray King's legs threw himself forward before he fully realized his own movements, sliding down the slant in a rushed flurry to reach the trapped frame.

_Please be alive._

Aura burst in a translucent corona from the tips of his fingers to the base of his wrist, plunging outwards against the boulder. It hardly budged, seemingly taunting his efforts with its bulk. Sucking air past his clenched teeth, the king focused, driving the 'fog' that was his namesake colour outwards as a phantasmal sledge. Mist poured around the scene, wisping into the air in a wreath of exertion.

At last, gingerly and with aching sloth, the object moved, sinking back and away with a creaking shift and spreading chalk-like powder into the air. The King didn't care, even as it bit at his eyes, his entire being was focused on the shape that emerged from the wreckage. The form hadn't moved, and in fact it was deathly still. 

_Please be alive._

"Oi, wake up!" The words flew free before he had time to even see the extent of damage. "Are you alright!?" 

Horror and grief swallowed any further noise he might've made. After all, the sight that awaited him was brutal evidence of his helplessness. A kid, barely in middle school, impaled on a protruding shard of stone. It'd gone clean through his alabaster sweater, near the heart, smearing the fabric an ugly shade of thick, dark scarlet. Blood was splattered around the rock underneath him, fresh and slick. 

"I'm too late..." To none other than himself were those self-loathing words directed, dripping with a heavy torment.

Dyed a similar shade of black, a sordid, wretched colour.

Unlike the passive, easy-going colour he was so likened with, all he felt now was emptiness. "He was just a little kid!"

And a bleak tar of boiling melancholy. 

"Is this the end result of the ideals I've pursued?" Was this his punishment for chasing after a world freed from the rigours of suffering, the bloodshed and contention that rocked humanity? Being forced to view the aftermath, unable to even join his clan in death?

Was Kagutsu's entire life deprived of no meaning other than a reminder that they were chained to a cycle of indescribable loss and instability? That the Slates had bound them as pawns to play their part and depart the world in tragedy?

"What use is a king's power if I can't even save one child!?" Spitting up the words with wretched disgust, a sore, harsh pain bridled in the back of his throat. His eyes stung from the dust, brimming with red edges as the hopelessness threatened to consume him. 

Even if Seigo Ootori, the Gray King, couldn't do anything..

Then Seigo Ootori, the human, could perform one last act for a child forced to pay the price for his worthlessness. His hand drifted to the icon hanging from his throat, a cross that could service as a final prayer. That at least the boy would find peace. Closing his eyes, he began that whimsical broken tribute in a heavy silence.

At that time, Seigo Ootori made a soulful petition to anyone or anything listening. Maybe without even realizing it, that conduit of subtle mental energy and emotional potency surpassed a mere mortal level, carrying on a wavelength reserved for those touched by the enigmatic mysteries of the slates. It was, in all but intent, a King's heavyhearted grief.

A grief that conveyed a dream, and a dream that conveyed a sliver of hope. 

Instead of the gray of decay, emptiness, and hollow ideals, the Gray King's heartfelt plea was a prayer for change. _  
_

The everchanging, ever evolving Green.

A verdant aurora blossomed around the skewered youth. A blanket of glistening emerald that cloaked the tiny body in shimmering, streaming light. Weismann levels perforated the surroundings in an incredible surge, ascending as though an invigorated heartbeat pumping wildly to course life into its host.

Seigo Ootori stared, baffled, speechless, as the cocoon of ethereal budding growth burst from the boy he'd mistaken as dead and gone. 

Motes of green swirled into the air, flickering by with gentle grace and tickling with soft electricity. He could only gape, slowly tilting his head backwards, to witness the formation of a Damocles Sword. At first a sphere of pulsating, raw energy, but gradually one that peeled away to reveal the blade that eternally pointed downwards. It was hardly sufficient enough to be called a matured, complete King's avatar, but the globe of intensity stabbed into his optic nerve as clearly as any omen he'd ever dared to see.

From that moment, Seigo Ootori ceased to be.


End file.
